One Beautiful Spring Day by Jim Woodring. Fantagraphics, 2022. 9781683965558. 402pp. https://www.powells.com/book/-9781683965558?partnerid=34778&p_bt
If you've never read a Frank book by Woodring this is the one to pick up. It's a combination of material originally published as three books -- Congress of Animals, Fran, and Poochytown -- with an extra hundred pages around those stories, connecting and completing them. It is epic, plus it's completely wordless, insanely weird, and somewhat gory and horrible in a way that I never quite recall. Frank and his friends remind me of classic cartoons, which are also often filled with suffering and awfulness in a way that's both amusing and unreal and that I don't really remember.
Bonus: I can almost guarantee that the art will make you stop reading to admire individual lines in the a drawing at some point.
